Writing in yesterday’s New York Times, Olivier Roy confidently asserted that the Muslim “youths” rioting in France are not carrying out anything to do with Islam, but rather are putting into violent action, in an effusion of pop nihilism, a French version of African-American-style “gangsta” culture. It is true that French Muslims have adapted black American “rap” to French vernacular. But, as Diana West shows, unlike black rap in the U.S. that is directed at raping and humiliating women, the French/Muslim rap is about raping and humiliating France and the French state. Which leads West to an interesting insight: isn’t such a program perfectly in line with the Koran’s commands to Muslims about how to behave toward non-believers, i.e., to terrorize, degrade, and kill them? She writes:

The vicious contempt, the exhortation to humiliation, the vindictive rape imagery: These are the motifs, at least, of brutal conquest, patterns and expressions familiar to students of jihad for having repeated themselves over the centuries as non-Muslim lands—Dar al Harb (Land of War)—were conquered and subjugated as Dar al Islam (Land of Islam). Is that what’s going on in France? Without doubt, such music prefigures a state of war, although no one but the rioters seems to have been listening.

So, far from being a subset of the international black-style gangsta cult, as Roy asserts, the French Muslim violence cult would seem to be a subset of Islam. It is Muhammad’s call to jihad, in a contemporary, black-flavored, sexualized, in-your-face vein.

A reader adds:

Gangsta jihad is consistent with the old time Islamic religion in that part of the booty, or “spoils of jihad,” a very significant part, was always what any modern “gangsta” would be comfortable in calling “booty,” i.e., nubile young women to be exploited sexually….